Lightning’s Tadge Dryja is Working On a Bitcoin Cash ‘Splitter’

Lightning Network creator Tadge Dryja is developing an experimental tool he hopes will help bitcoin users safely claim their newly created bitcoin cash.

To recap, on August 1, a group of users and mining pools who didn’t agree with bitcoin’s technical direction split off to create a new cryptocurrency, bitcoin cash, in the hopes of winning over users. And because of the way it “forked” from the blockchain, most users of bitcoin at the time are now left with an equal amount of bitcoin cash, and those funds are tied to their existing wallets.

Free cryptocurrency. Sounds great, right? The bad part is that forks open the possibility of “replay attacks,” where transactions on one chain are duplicated on the other, and which have lost users’ funds in the past.

And though bitcoin cash is touted as being able to tackle this problem in a safe way, Dryja has concerns about the software that highlight the politics and mistrust still in the air following the fork.

“I don’t want to run BCH [bitcoin cash] software as I don’t trust the people writing it,” he told CoinDesk.

His in-progress tool, called Goodelivery, is aimed to give users another option for safely splitting off the bitcoin cash tokens and moving them elsewhere – say to a new address or to an exchange to trade. However, he doesn’t recommend that users make real transactions with it just yet.

Dryja went on to say that the other reason for Goodeliver is that he doesn’t see it as a one-time-only tool. Since bitcoin cash has had “relative success” in spinning up a new network, he expects the new coin could inspire other future forks, especially now that its proven it’s possible to make money from such splits.

Despite building Goodeliver to help users, though, Dryja said he’s not a supporter of forks like the one that produced bitcoin cash:

“I view the current crop of hard forks as attacks on bitcoin and the concept of decentralized currency in general. It’s hard to argue to skeptics that bitcoin can have any value or scarcity if anyone can just duplicate it and double the number of coins in existence.”